Leadership-Followership Nexus Towards Community Rural Mobilization And Peace Building In Nigeria

Until recently, scholarship had not paid sufficient attention to the theory and practice of development and peacebuilding. Shifting attention to a key path in buildingpeace, where multiple stakeholders are involved and the relegated onesare incorporated in the establishment of positive peace in Nigeria, cannot be more timely and immediate. While this multi-stakeholder activity is paramount to ensuring that preventive and pre-hostility strategies are put in place, Nigeria's position in the involvement of the grassroots in development and peace initiative is still lagging in global reckoning of the template's best practices. The demographic dislocation has now bifurcated an urban-rural divide with little communicative pathways for rural development in relation to socio-economic strategic planning, implementation and monitoring of actions that promise to positively impact on the lives of the people at the periphery and engender peaceful coexistence.This paper seeks to examine leadership-followership relationship, linking this to how the past development plans of the country,in view of the options taken by the different succeeding regimes, have come to inform the present situation and postulates ways of improvement. In other words, the paper identifies leadership-followership dialectic as a crucial factor in rural community mobilization, good change and peace building.